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On Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled [PDF] that unauditable voting in the state does not infringe upon the fundamental right to vote and to have that vote counted. In 2002, Georgia was among the first in the nation to implement Diebold touch-screen voting machines across the entire state.

The lead plaintiff, Garland Favorito, was astounded. "This ruling essentially gives the state a license to pretend to conduct elections. Not one of the 100+ million votes that have been cast on the machines since 2002 can be audited for accuracy and correctness of vote recording." ...

"Georgia law in 2001 and 2002 required that any new machines have an independent audit trail of each vote cast. The state's own witnesses have acknowledged that the specific type of electronic voting machines we purchased and use do not have such an independent audit trail," Favorito told The BRAD BLOG. "The machines can only internally recreate selections that may or may not have been shown to the voter. Without an independent audit trail, it is impossible to determine whether the actual ballots cast on Election Day were recorded correctly."

His group, VoterGA.org, believes that "auditable electronic voting machines" exist. But software is undetectably mutable. It can change without leaving a trace; and it can do so without malice. Humidity or heat can cause an electronic system to fail, or its data to become corrupted.

There has been much research --- beginning in 2005 with computer security expert Harri Hursti's famous hacks in Leon County, Florida - which clearly show, repeatedly, that even optical scan machines can be maliciously programmed to defeat pre-election testing. So-called "Logic and Accuracy Tests" prior to elections can be subverted, without detection.

Once people submit their paper ballots on such systems --- and then those ballots are removed off site for counting --- the public chain of custody is broken and we therefore cannot rely on the paper count. Ballots should never leave the polling site before being counted. Not in any real democracy, anyway.

In our current world order, U.S. election officials have consistently chosen to ignore the science and rely on an electronic tally, preserving the ballots only for some potential future recount. Government officials offer little choice other than the public simply trust that they have protected those ballots from corruption --- the very ballots they use to assert authority.

While all of that is Orwellian enough and anathema to freedom, the Georgia Supreme Court has gone one step further. They ruled for completely secret, and entirely unverifiable vote casting and counting by allowing the worst possible technology: Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems. With those types of machines, in use across the entire Peach State, officials don't even have to pretend they kept their paper records secured --- there aren't any.

Favorito notes: "In this particular case, the previous boss of former Secretary of State [Cathy] Cox, who signed the purchase agreement, was the lobbyist for Diebold, the voting machine vendor." Diebold changed the name of its election division to Premier Election Solutions in 2007, in hopes of shaking off the horrible reputation they'd garnered after their voting systems --- both touch-screen and optical-scan paper-based systems --- were found to have failed in so many different states and scientific studies.

They've recently been acquired by their largest competitor, ES&S, which --- if the sale is allowed to go through --- would create a single voting machine company whose equipment will be used for more than two-thirds of the votes cast in the nation. Critics, including election integrity experts, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and even one of the remaining e-voting competitors still left in the market, are all challenging the sale on anti-trust grounds.

Yes, welcome to the New World Order, where corporations rule without accountability --- or auditability --- and where it seems things will be getting worse, before getting better.

It is abundantly clear from reading the decision that the GA Supreme Court doesn't have a clue what they are talking about, and is probably not interested in getting a clue. Were there no computer security experts around to explain the basics to these people? No independent audit trail + no independent verification = no confidence in the results. Seems like even the lowest level programmer for any bank should be able to make this abundantly clear to anyone, even the GA Supreme Court.

How long will we have to wait for the truth and justice to crush this judge's unqualified (but apparently authoritative) ruling? 10 years? 20?

And what corrupt pieces of crap, and jackass laws can we look forward to assuming power via these exploitable electronic vote tabulation devices in Georgia now?

Georgia's supreme court has learned how to use time itself as a sort of domestic proxy weapon against their own citizens.

e.g. We are right about the vulnerabilities and exploits in unvalidatable electronic vote tabulation devices, however the corruption in the GA Supreme Court has rubber stamped electronic vote tabulation devices which could be used for domestic terrorism by anyone with the motivation to do so.

Beat the lie, but not the corruption (backed by law enforcement) who assume power on the lie.

Every election should be on electronic voting machines with a paper trail. Every vote should also be printed on paper similar to a credit card receipt.

Every election should require positive ID for all voters. No ID = No vote. If there are very poor people who cannot afford a driver license or a state ID card, then the state should allow them to have it at no cost to them.

Mail in absentee ballets should also require positive ID. This is where most of the voter fraud occurs. Ballets could be dropped off in person at various trusted places (ie. the Post Office or banks) AND show ID.

hopefully the good folks at voterga are already picking this ruling apart

some of the logic they used is so backwards ,for example they use the 2000 election as evidence that even with paper ballots,there can be problems with getting an accurate vote count..sighting undervotes ,overvotes and hanging chads...they fail to mention the problem there was not with the paper ballots but with the electronic counters,hand counted paper ballots can always give an accurate count(with a proper chain of custody)

maybe ernie could explain why voting is not a fundamental right...i am not being a smart aleck,i honestly do not understand how the base of every descion we make in our democracy is not a fundamental right

the court said when the machines are "properly operated" they are accurate

•The Election Assistance Commission’s Security and Transparency Subcommittee concluded that testing cannot ensure that electronic voting machines will record votes correctly on Election Day. The draft conclusion from the Technical Guidelines Development Committee of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) regarding the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the EAC Security and Transparency Subcommittee (STS) states: “NIST and the STS do not know how to write testable requirements to satisfy that the software in a DRE is correct.”

the court also says,the legislator may make "reasonable and neutral" descions about voting but an innaccurate result can hardly be reasonable and having the same peoples that sold the machines test the machines is hardly "neutral"

i applaud the peops of voterga for their work and prayfully hope that more lawyers will take up our cause

I read the Visitor #4 comment, enlightening us who've been obsessing about election integrity matters for years and I wonder, what's next?
Karl Rove lecturing Dennis Kucinich on the importance of consistency and credibility?
Mark Sanford, John Ensign, and David Vitter giving Letterman advice on proper PR techniques for handling infidelity exposed?
RNC symposiums and self-help forums on the need to avoid hypocrisy?
HELLLLLLPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!

The way Americans vote and run elections should become the world model for all countries big and small.

The U.S. should be fighting in wars to spread the way Americans cast their vote and impose this care on on other country's elections to ensure every vote is not legitmately verified and not counted.

This system must be implimented by all other US states but more importantly in other countries. Especially, nations that refuse to use this American system or refuse to bow down to such US high court decisions.

Afterall, this is how individual candidates substanciate how they are selected to political office power and justified to run the nation of the Free and the Brave.

Then once a US elected politician is in office, this individual can go onto make his cabinet and judicial appointments in some cases to ensure that "their" people are in place to support "their" similar thinking process on critical issues and decisions.

Really, what the people of the US need in 2009 is a new holiday to celebrate the ruling of 1 of it's 50 finest state Supreme Court's to preserve the highly intellectual reasoning and thought process of this decision for all future generations of humanity to acknowledge.

A new election holiday celebrating unprovable election results would define US dominance to all other nations as end all world leaders on this issue. Then the US could become proclaimed official deciders of which elections are legitimate and which should be questioned around the world.

Then the US could take aggressive militaristic action against any country when we don't agree with their election results and that would of course prove once again why the US is dominant to all other nations of the world.